Richard Frost I have to admit that while I generally hate rants like yours, I have to make an exception for you. You have handled this obvious complaint with aplomb, humor and courtesy.

Here are the things that strike me as obvious:

1) Recruiters are forced, by necessity, to contact large numbers of people to find candidates that fit very narrow and esoteric skill sets;

2) These job descriptions need to be widely disseminated for the Recruiter to succeed in his/her challenge of identification of the best candidate(s) ;

3) Referrals of other candidates are essential to the business;

4) A Recruiter cannot get referrals without contacting people who aren't necessarily the right person for the job;

5) Everybody hates spam;

6) Recruiters hate spam too, and hate getting accused of spamming when they are earnestly trying to find the very rare candidate that matches the job description, which requires them to contact many people;

7) Recruiters need to use various software tools like Google Search, LinkedIn, etc. to identify people based on fundamental skill-sets (often referred to as "buzzwords" );

8) The software which exists currently is not that perfect, sometimes turning up false leads, etc.;

9) Software for Recruiters and search in general could be improved -- Google sucks, for example and is a lousy search engine compared to what it was just five years ago;

10) Google actually makes most of its money by selling ads, which actually biases search results, resulting in "spamdexing" of various URLs based on how much money they bring in to Google;

11) Spamdexing results in spam, when Recruiters try to process their search results which were intended for an altogether different purpose;

12) Spam is a prevalent problem with about 1 trillion spam emails sent per year, reaping only $200 million in revenues, according to sources: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/all-the-spam... ; this is interesting because The Atlantic (one of the oldest publications in the country) was accused of spamming in 2013, and was actually banned from Reddit;

13) Executive Search/Recruiting is an industry that is $400+ billion per year in scope;

14) The value of email from a Recruiter is therefore higher than "spam" -- essentially by about $399 billion , rendering the use of the term 'spam' highly dubious, although connotatively and vernacularly correct. At the same time, "recruiter spam" probably amounts to less than 0.1% of all unsolicited commercial email;

15) Software could easily be improved, with added AI functionality, etc., if Google (and other vendors) would work for free;

16) No one works for free (except Recruiters, apparently);

17) The need is for better search software and better email software with more flexibility, more opportunity and power to personalize, and better "reach" ;

18) This can probably only be achieved with the help of highly-skilled software engineers, who have no interest whatsoever in helping Recruiters make their work more accurate;

19) This attitude of negativity towards Recruiters actually damages the Software Engineering industry and results in more spam, instead of solutions;